Questions

Yes. There is no paid tier and nothing held back behind one. It is a personal project rather than a business, and it costs little enough to run that keeping it free is straightforward.

So your trails work across devices. Drift stores everything on your device first, which is fast, but a trail saved on a laptop would not exist on a phone. An account carries your trails, saved pages and settings between them, and is what makes sharing a trail possible.

An email address and a password. Nothing else is asked for.

No. There is no analytics script, no third-party tracker and no advertising cookie on the site at present. Your trails are readable by you, and by anyone you deliberately send one to. What Drift stores sets out the detail, and you can delete your account and its contents from inside the app.

There is one, it just runs on your input. The threads under each card are the steering. Drift also keeps a light record of which broad areas you have been reading, which only affects what turns up when you drift at random rather than choosing, and it can be switched off in settings.

What it does not do is learn what holds your attention and serve more of it silently. The reasoning is on principles.

It is yours to name, keep, export as an image, or delete. A saved trail lives in your account and syncs across your devices. You can send one to a friend inside Drift if you are both there. Nothing is published publicly and there is no feed of other people's trails.

Yes, and that is mainly what it is for. Drift installs to a home screen and runs full screen on iPhone and Android. The steps are on install. It is a web app, so there is no app store and nothing to update.

Not really. Cards are fetched live from Wikipedia or the Art Institute, so drifting needs a connection. Trails you have already saved are stored on your device and stay readable.

Wikipedia and the Art Institute of Chicago. Drift does not generate text on a card, so the accuracy is Wikipedia's accuracy: good for orientation, worth checking for anything that matters. Every card links to its source. Detail on sources.

Possibly. If so they would be clearly marked and separate from cards, and the privacy page would be updated first, since an ad script sets third-party cookies. What I want to avoid is time spent becoming the number the app is tuned for.

One person. More on about and colophon.

Let me know. Useful things to include:

• What you were doing when it went wrong.
• Phone or laptop, and whether Drift was installed to your home screen.
• What you expected to happen instead.